Renegade Rum's Sale - What We Know

Recent news reports out of Grenada note the closure of CaneCo, the company that handled the agricultural operations of providing sugarcane to Renegade Rum. This is unfortunate news for the many employees of CaneCo who were instrumental in bringing back sugarcane agriculture to Grenada at a significant scale starting in 2016.

Of course, the obvious question is “What happens to the Renegade distillery?”  A story from the Grenada Broadcasting Network notes, “This follows the sale of renegade rum distillery ltd., with the distillery’s new ownership no longer requiring a supply of sugarcane from Caneco.” As I write this, it’s not publicly known who purchased Renegade or their plans. However, I can provide some informed speculation. But first, here’s some background on Renegade and CaneCo’s operations.

Renegade Rum and CaneCo

The primary figure behind Renegade Rum and CaneCo is Mark Reynier, who first became known for purchasing and rehabilitating the Bruichladdich distillery before its subsequent sale to Rémy Cointreau in 2012. Along with partner investors, he subsequently purchased a brewery in Waterford, Ireland and converted it into the Waterford Whisky Distillery.

Mark Reynier

During the time Reynier’s investment group operated Bruichladdich, Renegade Rum was established as an independent bottler of rum, with aging occurring in Bruichladdich’s warehouses. At some point, Reynier decided that buying existing rum stocks wasn’t the best path forward, as he noted in our 2020 interview:

I was getting bored of independent whisky bottlings. The stocks were drying up. All the good stuff had gone, quality had gone downhill, and you were left with inferior whiskies. The glory days had gone. Scraping a barrel, basically.

Rum seemed to offer interesting alternatives. Similar age, obscure distilleries, many which had shut down. It was an exciting replacement.

What I didn’t realize at the time was that rum was in an even worse position. It was like Scotch whisky in the ’70s. There were even fewer barrels. The age statements were suspicious. The quality even more so. The availability was less. It was just the same thing but in poorer condition.

But I realized that it was quite fun playing around with these older distilleries. It was quite romantic and exciting. You learn a bit about them. You realize there’s not much information out there. It’s hard to find any reliable facts, but it was intriguing.

The majority of these European-aged rums were molasses in origin, but there was enough there to think, “Let’s have some fun with this.” But then, realizing that there weren’t enough stocks. Ultimately, you have to do something else.

That “something else” was distilling rum to his own criteria. As he noted in the same interview, Reynier first considered buying an existing distillery, but that didn’t pan out:

I looked at quite a few over a ten-year period, initially looking for stocks and then distilleries. But the thing that kept coming home to me was that many were in a shocking state of repair. Very uneconomic in today’s world; unproductive old machinery, old equipment, poorly maintained, mostly pre-colonial era equipment that suffered from a lack of investment and maintenance. You’ve seen them; all the bits lying around the distilleries, abandoned.

None gave me a great deal of confidence, so that’s when I decided I needed to build my own.

Eventually, Reynier and his investors settled on Grenada as a home for the new distillery:

It took a long time till I discovered Grenada. That was a serendipitous choice. My Financial Director had a university friend who had a house here. He persuaded me to come down to have a look. I knew of Westerhall and Graham [Williams, Managing Director] from our independent bottling. I thought, “Let’s go and have a look.” ….

Frankly, if it wasn’t for my colleague Graham’s enthusiasm and ability to pull something out of the fire every now and again, I’d have gone long ago. We wouldn’t have got past growing a few bits of cane.

And money! The cost of doing it; convincing my shareholder supporters that it was worth doing this so far away; getting all the component suppliers to believe that it made sense. It requires a lot of convincing of a lot of people to make these things happen. Then, when push came to shove, and we were three-quarters of the way through the build, we ran out of money. Having to go back and get more, that’s a tricky, tricky thing to do.

However, the new Renegade Rum Distillery wouldn’t be any old distillery; it would be environmentally conscious and focused on maximizing terroir by distilling only from sugarcane. This was harder than initially thought, as Grenada’s sugarcane agriculture had effectively slowed to a crawl starting in the 1980s. Reynier noted in the same interview:

The idea of coming here [to Grenada] was to get farmers to grow cane themselves. To empower farmers — provide them with the cane and the know how to do it. But entrepreneurially, that just didn’t work. It was too much of an ask, so we’ve ended up being farmers ourselves. We’ve equipped ourselves to farm what is essentially what’s left of the estates from the British colonial era.

When we came here, there was no cane at all, apart from one field being used by River Antoine. We had to find land, lease it, rent it, clear it of forty years of jungle, prepare it and plant it up. That’s what we’ve done over the proceeding four years.

When I visited Renegade in January 2020, the company hoped to be distilling before my arrival. While the main structures had been erected and the stills were in place, much work remained to be completed. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic substantially delayed progress and added to the project cost. In 2018, it was estimated that the total project cost would be US $40 million, US $20 million for the distillery, and US $20 million for cultivation and plant operations.

Renegade’s initial releases were unaged, single farm, single harvest expressions designed to highlight differences in terroir. Concurrently, rum was laid down in different types of casks, and the aged Études expressions hit the market in 2022.

For more information on Renegade Rum’s history and production, see the Grenada chapter of Modern Caribbean Rum.

What Happened?

As noted earlier, Renegade’s investors budgeted US $40 million to build the distillery and create a steady supply of sugarcane. However, well-informed industry sources indicate that the final total likely exceeded the budgeted amounts by a substantial margin.

We don’t know whether it was the distillery or the agricultural operations that created the biggest shortfall, but it’s well known that Caribbean sugarcane is notoriously unprofitable. Commercial sugarcane has vanished from many islands like Trinidad and Puerto Rico and is a tiny fraction of its former size in locales like Barbados and Guyana. Even Martinique’s cane farmers rely on government subsidies to some extent.

While Renegade’s rum is well-loved by enthusiasts, it’s entirely possible that the cash flow hasn’t been enough to meet investors’ expectations. As such, those aforementioned sources indicate Reynier’s investment group has been looking for a buyer for several months, if not longer.

The distillery is extremely modern and efficient, and it’s hard to imagine any purchaser scrapping it or using the facility for other purposes. The wording in the aforementioned news story, i.e., “the distillery’s new ownership no longer requiring a supply of sugarcane…” suggests that the new owner will continue to operate the distillery, albeit not exclusively using sugarcane. It’s possible that CaneCo’s economics may not have worked out with the buyer’s plans.

Who’s the buyer? We can only speculate, but here’s what I’m thinking. It’s either:

• A large multinational like Diageo or Pernod Ricard looking to expand their rum brand portfolio with a modern distillery purchased at a substantial discount

• A smaller but very passionate player in the rum space looking to acquire its own distillery at a good price. A prior example of this happening is when Plantation Rum (now Planteray) purchased the West Indies Rum Distillery for around US $13 million in 2017. It’s also possible that a grouping of rum-focused companies could collectively invest.

I’ll update this story here when we know more.

Personal Note

Since my 2020 visit to Renegade, I’ve rooted hard for their success. I’m a fan of the company’s people, operations, and approach to premium rum.

Beyond just that, Mark Newton and Jane Nurse, along with the rest of Renegade’s team, were immensely helpful to me while writing Modern Caribbean Rum. They shared both diagrams and photos for me to use as I saw fit in the book. Their diagrams play an important part in the distilling chapter, and they sent up their drone several times in search of the perfect cover image. The photo we ultimately selected—a lush green cane field stretching towards a vibrant blue ocean—was taken just steps from the Renegade distillery.